Fire
by Lucillia
Summary: Vernon can learn to be decent, all it takes is the death of the Boy-Who-Lived and several decades to see the consequences unfold. Vernon goes back to prevent 8 year-old Harry from dying in a fire that Petunia set intending to get the boy into trouble.
1. Chapter 1

I'm dying and I know it. It's almost a relief to die considering the hell this world has become. You all don't remember what the world was like before because you all were much too young when it happened, when he took over, that was if any of you were even born then. The old man Dumsomethingorother told me that it was all my fault before our "Gracious and Magnanimous Lord" killed him. You know what? I believe him. It was all my and Petunia's fault. If I hadn't been lazy, and it Petunia hadn't set that fire things would have been different. I know they would have. God, the one time I was hoping, praying for the boy to use his magic, he didn't, he couldn't.

What does a fire have to do with the way the world is now you ask? Everything.

Me and Petunia were entrusted with the care of a boy who according to prophesy was supposed to defeat our Lord when he grew up. He didn't grow up because me and Petunia murdered him.

How, you ask?

It's a long story. But the boy, his name was Harry, was Petunia's sister's child. Petunia had been jealous over the fact that her sister was a witch, and after her sister died and the boy was left with us, that jealousy didn't go away. My opinion on magic was that it was unnatural, and I didn't want it in the house. Every time the boy did magic, or I thought the boy did magic, I would punish him. Usually I would punish him by locking him in the cupboard we kept him in for a couple days without food, or assign several chores I or Petunia didn't want to deal with.

Well, to make a long story short, Petunia liked seeing the boy get punished and - as I would learn after it was far too late - would often frame the boy. Maybe one in ten or less of the "Magical Incidents" I had punished the boy for had actually been done by the boy. On the night the boy died, Petunia had decided to frame her eight year-old nephew for starting a small trash fire. Petunia's plan had been to start a small fire in the kitchen trash, go back to bed, wait fifteen minutes, then wake me up claiming that she smelled smoke. She had been hoping to see me finally take a belt to the boy.

Her plan probably would have worked, if I hadn't been lazy earlier that day. You see, I had a bunch of old rags in the garage that I planned to throw out. The rags had been used to wipe down various things such as the lawn mower, a small turpentine spill, varnish from an old woodworking project and whatnot and as a result had several different chemicals on them. Instead of walking over to the outside trash, chucking them and then heading into the kitchen for a snack, I had just chucked them in the kitchen trash on my way to the fridge.

Petunia's small fire which on any other day would have just burned some food and maybe a bit of paper caught the rags alight, and as some of them had oil and petrol on them, you could just imagine what happened. What was supposed to be a small fire that would just get the trash and a bit of the wall, forcing me or rather the boy to repaint the kitchen like she wanted me to turned into a raging inferno pretty damn quick especially after it caught the ceiling and the cabinets, especially the cabinet under the sink in which the cleaning supplies were kept. In the fifteen minutes that Petunia sat waiting to wake me up, the fire had flashed over into the dining room.

By the time Petunia managed to wake me up most of the downstairs was an inferno. My first concern had been my son Dudley. In my panicked state, I completely forgot about the boy. By the time I remembered the boy, it was too late. The living room was already on fire as well as the front hall, making it impossible for me to go back inside and get him.

That had been the first and only time I had hoped, even prayed for the boy to use magic. As we waited for the firefighters I prayed that the boy would pop up somewhere unharmed. As the firefighters had gone into the house looking for the boy and failed to find him, I had thought he'd magicked himself away.

It had not been so. When investigators came to find the source of the fire the next day, they found him or rather what was left of him locked up in the remains of the cupboard under the stairs where we had left him.

There had been a time when I denied it was my fault. There had been a time when I'd blamed the boy for not magicking himself out of the cupboard. There had been a time when I placed all of the blame on Petunia who had been the one to start the fire. Now I know better. If I hadn't done my utmost to squash the magic out of the boy...If I'd just taken a couple of seconds to unlock the cupboard the boy was in and shake him awake before the fire got too bad...If I'd never locked the boy in in the first place...If I'd done something about Petunia framing the boy after I caught her bleaching one of my ties and later blaming it on the boy a week earlier...

It was bad enough that I helped kill a child, what's worse is that child was supposed to grow up and save us all. We're all slaves because I'd been squeamish about magic and because I had allowed Petunia to wallow in her petty jealousies for far too long.

What do you mean I can stop it all? How can I stop it all? I'm dying, and besides it's far too late.

What the ruddy hell is an unspeakable? How the hell can you be as old as me, you can't be more than middle aged. The only reason I lived so long was because it amused our Lord to make me see what I helped do to my kind by killing off the only one who could possibly oppose him. Seems that the old man had been cursing my name amongst others as our Lord killed him.

What do you mean I'm probably the only one who can fix things?

That's bloody ironic, me being the only one who is able to be sent that far back in time by magic because I don't have any ruddy magic.

When do we start? It better be soon mind you, I don't have long.

Now? Now's good.

Goodbye then.


	2. Chapter 2

When I opened my eyes and saw something I hadn't seen in several decades I wondered if I was in hell. Surely my actions throughout my long life hadn't earned me a spot in heaven. The visit from the former "Unspeakable" that I received while I was on my deathbed seemed like a dream. Why would such a person come looking to me to fix things? I was the one that caused it all by killing the child that was supposed to protect us from Our Lord. Being in the house I hadn't set foot in since that awful day, and seeing the sun for the first time in decades was both painful and the source of a hope I barely dared to name.

A wizarding "Dark Lord" that had been raised in the muggle world of the twentieth century was a truly horrific thing. When prior "Dark Lords" had decided to exterminate any muggles that they didn't want to use as slaves, they had used magic. During the process of extermination they invariably found that there were far too many muggles in the world for them and their followers to deal with personally even if they worked at killing them twenty four hours a day, seven days a week for several years and either gave up because such things weren't feasible with their opponents constantly attacking them and/or defending the muggles or died before they could find a way to deal with the problem. The first muggle raised "Dark Lord" in centuries however had rather unfortunately for the rest of us been born at the right time and had a muggle solution that hadn't been available in previous centuries at hand to deal with the problem of how to get rid of the "excess" muggles that had stymied every "Dark Lord" that had come before him.

Our Magnanimous and Gracious Lord Voldemort, who still had dealings with the muggle world at the end of the Second World War and kept a couple ties with it in the decades after didn't care what condition the world was in just so long as he got to rule it. A few murders and some mind control curses in the right direction, and virtually all of us muggles were rather ironically wiped out with muggle means. About the only type of human that could survive radiation and a nuclear winter was a wizard and however many of us muggles he or she decided to take as slaves more for the look of the thing rather than out of any actual need of our services as wizards already had a species of domestic servant to deal with the things that they couldn't be bothered to do with magic. The wizards that weren't killed directly in the nuclear blasts could practically live as kings in lavish underground shelters that had been built with their magic. While magic can't create food, it could find a way to grow it underground and speed up the growth cycle if necessary, keeping food shortages from being an issue.

It had been my good fortune or misfortune that the prison I was in during the time of destruction was well outside of the range of the blast that took out London. Our Lord had decreed that his new empire would be built with the sweat and blood of the few surviving muggles that existed and ordered for those of us that survived the nuclear holocaust and its immediate aftermath to be rounded up and brought to the vast system of caverns that would house its capitol and monument to his victory. I was soon set to building the vast underground city that Our Lord had designed.

It had been in my third year of captivity that Our Lord had learned who I was when he took out the last member of the resistance. The man who had revealed my identity - a man who had grown up with my wife and her sister - had decided he would take me out for my role in the boy's death before he died when he learned that his true loyalties may have been discovered. Apparently, he had seen me by chance the day before when he'd gone to visit the overseer - a particularly cruel man named Flint - who had been a former student of his. The man, Snape, had either lost his wand or had deemed me not worthy of being killed by magic when he decided it was time to do the deed, because his weapon of choice that day had been a rather wicked looking knife. It had been while he was killing me slowly and painfully with that knife - nicking and slicing rather than stabbing - that Our Lord had showed up to deal with him personally.

It was then that I became something of a pet to Our Lord, something he kept because it amused him. Every year, on the anniversary of his Grand Victory he would parade me before the people and tell them how I had aided him by killing the child that prophesy had said would have the power to defeat him. The "crowd" that would have only been considered a largeish group before the human race had been decimated would jeer and laugh at me, or in the case of some of my fellow muggles throw things at me that were meant to either hurt or kill.

While I was the best treated out of the handful of muggles that had survived out of the six billion there had been before the time of destruction - which when you come down to it isn't really saying much -, it was for something I wished I had never done. When I grew too old to work, I had awaited death with an almost eager anticipation that almost frightened those who dreaded the day they too became too old to work. Death was denied to me however. Our Lord had decided he wanted to keep me a while longer as I still amused him, and so I stayed alive long after my peers and many who were much younger than me had died. I was forced to wait for old age to take me because some magic spell had long ago rendered me incapable of suicide.

Now, I am in a place that could be my own personal hell. This is quite likely the beginning of me being forced to spend an eternity reliving every horror I had experienced from the death of my nephew to the death of my world after once more seeing everything I had caused to be lost in my foolishness. I barely dare to hope I can change anything but, I still hope, and that is probably what will make this that much worse.


	3. Chapter 3

I had found myself standing in the garage staring at the rags I knew would be there, instead of going to work. Rather than being the perfect woman I remembered Petunia to be, I saw the monster I had learned her to be when I finally heaved myself out of bed and headed down to breakfast. Those sweet glances Petunia gave me were soured by the hateful looks she gave the boy who was supposed to save us all. My son wasn't nearly as perfect as I remembered him to be either. I found myself barely refraining from striking him when stole food he didn't need from the boy. How could enough food to feed him for three days not be enough?

Seeing the true face of my "Perfectly Normal" family was painful and horrifying. I would never be able to see them as "Darling Perfect Wife", "Beloved Perfect Son" and "The Burden That Shouldn't Be Here" ever again. Perhaps this is part of my punishment.

Eventually, I tore my eyes away when Petunia had called me in for lunch, and made one of her ominous comments about how the kitchen should be repainted. After Lunch, I volunteered to pick the children up from school.

It was while I was waiting for my son and my nephew to arrive, that I saw one of the things I despised the most after the fall. There was a fat creature at the head of a gang picking on a group of others who were trying to mind their own business and get back to their homes. From the way he shoved the smaller children rather than use a wand, it was obvious that he was Muggle. That made him a collaborator.

It was when the creature turned to move after my nephew who was looking at me in surprise and confusion that I finally realized that this mound of fat was my own son.

Later that afternoon, I was forced once again to refrain from striking my son. I had looked at the mess of broken toys in Dudley's second bedroom, and wondered why he had even needed that room. Why have a room you didn't use? Whole families had fit into rooms this size, and this one was just filled with junk.

I decided there and then to give the room to the boy, my nephew, and started clearing it out barely believing the excessive amount of waste each broken item represented. As I sorted the items, throwing things that weren't potentially salvageable in the trash, my son ranted and railed at me demanding I put them back or replace them with something better.

Cleaning out the room while my son did everything he could to hinder my progress took a great deal of time. My task was interrupted before it was complete by a commotion in the kitchen that I decided to investigate.

It had been when Petunia had struck Harry with a frying pan during the preparations for the dinner I usually arrived in time to eat, that I finally acted as I should have done earlier.

It seemed to take an eternity for the police to arrive. While I was forced to use both hands to restrain my wife from further harming the child she should have been caring for, my son took the opportunity to heap more abuse on the child who had done nothing wrong other than be born to the wrong parents, viciously assaulting the boy who had stayed frozen out of shock.

Somehow, the scene ended up with me getting arrested and Petunia being free to do god knows what to the boy.

I tried to tell the officers that they had just left the child with a woman who had just hit him with a frying pan and a boy who repeatedly assaulted him at every available opportunity, but they wouldn't listen. I had to do something and fast. I didn't know what however.

Fortunately, someone allowed me to make a phone call. There was only one number I knew off the top of my head. I hoped against hope that she would be able to do something.

"My God Marge, you've got to help me. Petunia's gone insane. I think she's going to kill our nephew. I know I shouldn't have humored her when it came to the boy all these years, but...God, Mum was right about her, Mum was right."


	4. Chapter 4

As I waited and hoped that Marge would somehow be able to do something, I remembered the early days with Petunia. The woman had been one of the few girls that would actually pay any attention to me, and I had been smitten. My mother had warned me about her, saying that she wasn't the sort of girl I should be with, but I had been in love with her, and she with me, or so I thought.

Now, I wonder if she ever loved me at all or had been more in love with the idea of a man who had loved her and was willing to work hard in order to give her anything and everything she wanted. What Petunia wanted at the time we married was a normal life, or rather the illusion of a normal life. I think I was just the means to what she thought she wanted.

My mother must have seen it long ago, in the final days before she died. Mother always did say that Petunia was a two-faced bitch and that she would get me in trouble someday, but I had refused to believe her. Petunia had been the nicest and sweetest woman I had known in those early days. It was very slowly and gradually that she had revealed her true nature to me, and by the time she finally did I had become so accustomed to it to the point that I hadn't even realized she changed until after the fire.

It had gone from the point where she was the sweetest girl in the universe, to the point where I feared upsetting her, but it had gone so gradually, from little things until I was accepting her destroying the house and willing to blame the boy in order to preserve marital harmony. By the time the fire came, I had thought things were completely normal, when they couldn't have been the farthest from. My wife had been very, very sick, and I hadn't seen it. My mother had however, and probably my sister as well, considering the fact that she rarely visited even though she didn't live all that far away.

I was torn from my musings when some young punk came up to me looking for a fight.

"Do you know what I do to assholes who beat their wives?" the punk who had oddly colored hair asked in a threatening manner.

"I don't know, but I'd like to know what you'd do to women who hit their nephews with frying pans right in front of you." I countered calmly. I'd seen and dealt with worse in prison after the fire.

Instead of hitting me, the young man stood there staring at me at a loss for words. Apparently, he'd gone after me because he really hated wife beaters, rather than because I looked like an easy target in my current state, and my supposed crime gave him a good excuse to do so.

"I didn't even hit her, but I was the one who ended up here after I finally decided to do the right thing by the boy and stop her from hurting him." I continued when the little punk didn't move, I'd wanted to get this off my chest for a while now.

"I'm partially to blame for the situation since I didn't treat the boy right either, but I wouldn't have gone so far as to use a frying pan. The worst I considered using on the boy was a belt like my father used on me. I considered using it before when the boy misbehaved, but Petunia said "No, that's child abuse, someone will notice.", and it turns out that she's been whacking the boy in the head with a frying pan behind my back." I continued as the punk sat down, having decided not to challenge me.

"In many ways, I brought this situation on myself since I've been letting my family get away with whatever the hell they wanted, and had even encouraged them sometimes thanks to a skewed idea of reality that I'd been forced to reconsider due to some recent events. I hadn't wanted the boy there in the first place, and made him know he wasn't wanted. I was verbally abusive and worse to the boy, and never acknowledged it, since in my view it couldn't have been abuse if I wasn't hitting him. I'd known that Dudley had been bullying him and having his little gang chase him, and suspected that Petunia had been getting him into trouble just to watch me yell at him, but I hadn't cared." I continued, letting it all out, knowing that I deserved to have the crap kicked out of me because of how I treated a member of my family who I'd determined to be an outsider since he wasn't my blood, and Petunia hadn't wanted him.

"I saw my wife hit the boy with the frying pan, and it was finally one step too far. I finally decided to do the right thing and report what was going on. Petunia however managed to turn the tables on me. She'd always been good at that. That, and getting people to believe she was the victim when she wasn't." I said. That wasn't the entire truth, but it was close enough. This time the frying pan had been one step too far, but last time I had been so inured to my wife's behavior that it hadn't even fazed me. Now that I knew what could happen to the world with the boy gone, I knew that I had to do everything in my power to protect him and ensure he survived so he could fulfill the prophesy and keep Our Lord Voldemort from destroying the world.

"Damn, that's messed up." the punk said, clearly at a loss for what to say or do.

Yes, it was messed up. The entire situation was messed up, and I was the only one who could fix it. I'm not sure how though, especially since I was facing jail time and anything could happen to the boy while I'm in here. Marge, who was far more conservative than me wasn't the best choice for Harry, but she was the only option I had. I had very few friends, and I couldn't call my coworkers or boss and ask if they could drop by my house and rescue my nephew whom I and my wife had been abusing, especially since they had been unaware of the fact that I had a nephew.

I could only hope that Marge could get down here and rescue the boy in time.


End file.
